Political Economic Processes Research Articles

The quest for a good old age: mobility, immobility and Puerto Rican aging in the United States

ABSTRACT Mobility regimes refer to the political economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced, and permitted to move and to migrate. The literature on aging in contexts of mobility regimes has primarily focused on international migration, even though the framework is multi-scalar. This article examines how older Puerto Rican adults navigate mobility regimes in the quest for a subjective good old age. Puerto Rico is a US territory, which means that Puerto Rico-US migration does not span international borders. Drawing on remote ethnographic research with older Puerto Rican adults, I argue that political-economic processes rooted in US colonialism simultaneously condition migration as a strategy for the pursuit of a good old age and contribute to inequitable circumstances that make a good old age hard to find. These inequitable processes manifest in three ways: (1) Unequal healthcare benefits contribute to mobility; (2) Unequal social welfare benefits contribute to immobility; and (3) The meanings and mobilities associated with unequal benefits shift over the life course. By focusing on how governments differentially regulate the internal migration of their own citizens, this article advances understanding of how mobilities and immobilities operate at multiple scales, with important implications for a good old age.

Expanding Water Privatization in Mozambique: Producing Success, Reproducing Neoliberal Water

ABSTRACTThis article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique ‘produced success’ out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision‐making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post‐neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience.

INOVAÇÃO E TEORIA ATOR-REDE

Sociology of innovation is a transdisciplinary approach to research and development whose theoretical-methodological framework is based on the Actor-Network Theory. The article aims to map scientific communications produced in the literature about innovation and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). As bibliographical research, a semiotic-material approach is used to map these research interests on the Dimensions scientific data platform, seeking to explore their problematization networks via word co-occurrence and clustering with the VOSviewer network analysis software, in addition to describing their translational movements based on the titles and summaries of the mapped research itself and the literature itself in some way related. Two problematization networks about innovation and ANT are explored, one being multidisciplinary (see relationships between different fields of research such as health, management and technologies) and the other interthematic (through actor-words such as “implementation”, “framework” and “knowledge”. Such research interests are crossed by the very semiotic-material complexity of scientific production and communication related to ANT and innovation, performing socio-technical and political-economic processes of invention, negotiation and commercialization between human and non-human actors, of somehow linked to different knowledge and domains of scientific and technological knowledge.

When Rubber Bullets Fly, Family Comes First: How Fathers in Hong Kong Reconciled with Their Activist Children

ABSTRACT The article examines the dynamics of father-children relationships in conflict management during and after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement in Hong Kong. In-depth interviews with 17 fathers and 21 activists revealed how authoritarian approaches to fatherhood influence family conflict outcomes against the backdrop of social upheaval during and after the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. A conceptual framework of intimacy and face (mianzi or lian) enriches the discussion of fatherhood roles, father-children conflict management, and how participation in social movements affects their relationships. The construct of fatherhood is variable, changing, and relational, and it involves intimacy and face for father-son/daughter relationships to remain healthy during political conflicts. Hong Kong presents a unique case of evolving fatherhood, parent-child relationships, and family dynamics where the link between gender and social movement participation is extended beyond political-economic processes. This article contributes to the literature on the intergenerational dialogue between fathers and their activist children outside a Western context.

Guns, gender and petroleum: a critical analysis of the underlying dynamics of Timor-Leste’s development trajectory

This article examines the underlying political economy context of the uneven development outcomes in post-conflict Timor-Leste. We use a modified version of a structural political economy approach that is situated in a Gramscian understanding of the state-society relationship. This approach conceptualises development as a process of historically specific class-based and gender-based contestations over the distribution of resources that result in particular forms of socio-political orders maintained through a combination of institutional and ideological mechanisms of wealth generation. Our analysis of whose interests have been prioritised and marginalised in post-independence Timor-Leste is based on a systematic examination of three major factors: regulation of class relations, organisation of gender relations, and the governance of the petroleum industry. We conclude that despite some important improvements in the formation of formal democratic institutions in Timor-Leste, the processes of the distribution of power and access to resources remain far from being inclusive prioritising a class-based group of male-dominant elites that manipulates institutions to advance their interests and use a hegemonic gender ideology to justify and maintain these existing unequal arrangements in the prevailing socio-political order. Thus, the development outcomes in Timor-Leste are strongly connected to the political-economic processes from a larger historical perspective.

The production-protection nexus: How political-economic processes influence prospects for transformative change in human-wildlife interactions

This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existing literature exploring social dimensions of such interactions has largely neglected attention to political-economic forces. This is consonant with efforts to transform conservation policy and practice more broadly, which tend to emphasize “circular” change within current political-economic structures rather than “axial” transformation aiming to transcend these structures themselves. Our analysis thus advances understanding of potential for axial transformation in HWI via confrontation with, and “unmaking” of, constraining political-economic structures. It does so through cross-site analysis of conservation policy and practice in relation to three apex predator species (lions, jaguars and wolves) in varied geographic and socio-political contexts, grounded in qualitative ethnographic study within the different sites by members of an international research team. We explore how the relative power of different political-economic interests within each case influences how the animals are perceived and valued, and how this in turn influences conservation interventions and their impact on HWI within these spaces. We term this analysis of the “production-protection nexus” (the interrelation between process of resource extraction and conservation, respectively) in rural landscapes. We emphasize importance of attention to this formative nexus both within and across specific locales in growing global efforts to transform situations of human-wildlife conflict into less contentious coexistence.

Climate governance by numerical data: The kaleidoscopic political space of a decarbonization dashboard

ClimateOS is a software whose promise is to provide climate policymakers with reliable and actionable transition plans towards decarbonization, thanks to its algorithms’ ability to handle large amounts of numerical climate data. What data to feed ClimateOS’ algorithms? This is a question that greatly concerns its developers and one that I analyse in this article for its socio-political implications. Specifically, I unpack how developers relate to the accuracy and reliability of numerical data. I suggest that their multifaceted approach to numerical climate data allows ClimateOS to open a political space where the various transition plans the software offers can be tinkered with. This article brings critical geographers and material semiotics scholars in conversation. The former argue that data-driven (decarbonization) governance practices depoliticize climate issues, characterizing such initiatives as the effects and expressions of global political economic processes. The latter show how different environmental accounting practices, at different times, produce different performances of nature; and how different ways of relating to numbers enact alternative modes of treating numbers accountably. In this article, I show how ClimateOS opens a political space that engenders social relations and co-produces articulations of a decarbonized future. Because of its multifaceted approach to numerical data, I characterize this political space as kaleidoscopic, where different and often incompatible political values and logics are enacted simultaneously.

The role of the state in the touristification of Lisbon

The explanation regarding the recent touristification of cities has significantly focused on the ability of platforms such as Airbnb to offer millions of tourist beds in areas that were not planned for tourism use. Exploring Lisbon, we offer instead a political economic explanation where touristification is the result of the active intervention of the neoliberal state. Lisbon moved from a phase of abandonment to be gentrified by tourism in a very short period. To explain this, we examine how the state absorbed the cost of redevelopment, thus ensuring that private capital could extract profits from rehabilitation, and allowed developers to build the most profitable product with no limitations, which to a great extent are short-term rentals, hotels, and luxury housing for transnational users. By examining how the central city has been re-invented to serve the needs of private capital, we develop a dialogue between this general process of gentrification and how it is experienced in Southern Europe as a wave of intense touristification. We contextualize this within the historical political economic process in which the European South has progressively become a space of vacation for transient populations who are presented as the new class to be served.

Интеграционные процессы в мировой экономике: нооподход и развитие евразийского пространства

Within the current conditions and realities – namely, aggravation of inter-country conflicts, continuous chains of financial and economic crises, unpredictable epidemics and pandemic, increasing threats and risks to the existence of humanity – issues of integration and solidarity are becoming particularly relevant. At the same time, the existing theories of integration and approaches to its interpretation, identification of stages and evaluation of results are very specific due to the concentration mainly on economic and political-economic processes, as well as often because of their “sharpening” for the European Union. The purpose of this paper is to develop an alternative (to the “classical” one) approach to the determination and analysis of integration based on the theory of noonomy worked out by S. D. Bodrunov. The article provides evidence of an overestimating the results of European integration, based mainly on the creation in theory and practice of its idealized image of this continuously progressive and exemplary model that stands out from the rest of the world. The basic provisions and conclusions of noonomy, the “parallels” of this theory and the results of its “conjugation” with the theory of changing technological modes and the concept of changing world economic modes, worked out by S. Y. Glazyev, are presented. We enter the concept of “noointegration”, highlight its main stages and analyze the differences and correlation of its processes with classical integration. It is explained why noo-integration, without denying economic integration at the pre-noonomic stage of public life, turns out to be of a higher priority and more useful for the harmonious joint development of the Eurasian space and its participating countries than the classical integration model.

Migration and development, without care? Locating transnational care practices in the migration‐development debate

AbstractHighly‐restrictive temporary labour migration schemes are commonplace throughout the Indo‐Pacific region and continue to expand amid sustained policy enthusiasm for ‘migration‐development’. Yet, the developmental benefits of guestworker schemes are routinely evaluated according to narrow economic criteria, with little consideration given to transnational family separation and the displacement of socially reproductive labour that sustains everyday life. ‘Migration’, ‘development’ and ‘care’ are deeply interlinked political economic processes, yet they have been theorised in partial isolation. We challenge this analytical disconnect, situating the developmental implications of guestworker migration in relation to the total social organisation of labour, and argue for a more holistic ‘migration‐care‐development' nexus that foregrounds unsustainable disruptions to care economies. We ground our framework in the context of Australia's Pacific Labour Scheme to illustrate the developmental consequences for Pasifika households and communities, highlighting the need for ‘decent care’ policies to address care deficits in support of sustainable and gender‐equitable development.

Unequal and unjust: The political ecology of Bangkok’s increasing urban heat island

The intensity of Bangkok’s urban heat island during the dry season can be as high as 6–7° and in the densest areas the urban heat island’s intensity is approximately 4°C. The urban heat island thus is causing a city already oppressively hot to become even hotter. The urban heat island also contributes to health problems, such as heat stroke and fatigue, particularly to those with lower incomes. We historically examine the numerous causes of Bangkok’s urban heat island, such as the lack of green space, high levels of air conditioning, and high rates of vehicle exhaust fumes. For example, Bangkok has only three square metres of green space per person which is one of the lowest in all of Asia. Local governmental weaknesses, administrative fragmentation, prioritisation of economic growth and limited buy-in from the private sector have intensified Bangkok’s urban heat island, and imposed numerous barriers to actions that would reduce heat, such as establishing green space, restructuring urban transport or creating and following an effective urban plan. Ideas mooted to remedy these problems have yet to come to fruition, largely because of bureaucratic inertia, fragmentation and divisions within the relevant lead organisations. The political ecology lens also reveals how political–economic processes largely determine the vulnerability of urban inhabitants to heat, but also that thermal governance is highly unequal and unjust. Those who contribute to and profit the most from Bangkok’s urban heat island, such as real estate developers, shopping mall owners, and automobile corporations, suffer the least from its effects, whereas low-income communities hardly contribute to this problem, yet are the most vulnerable.

EIDs and the Intersectional Health/Livelihoods Paradox in the Rural Global South

This article presents the framework of the intersectional health/livelihoods paradox to analyse how political economic processes incur land use change to create vulnerability to infectious disease, but that in contending with these risks rural people negotiate conflicts with livelihoods. The conflicts and trade-offs people make in deliberating over health and livelihood outcomes because of ecological degradation are distributed unevenly through lines of social difference, such as gender and class. While the health/livelihoods paradox is evident within contexts of vulnerability to infectious disease, it is poignant when considering the impacts of interventions and containment strategies to control outbreaks in rural settings. Despite considerable attention on the urban context of disease surveillance, spread and containment due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this article refocuses analysis of the impacts of emerging infectious disease (EID) in rural contexts. The article shifts attention away from analysis of the problematic practices of rural households that undertake livelihood activities such as harvesting of wildlife for consumption, to a nexus between land use change, ecologies, livelihoods and health. The literature is fragmented in terms of the landscapes explored, developmental processes, species dynamics, diseases and social contexts. Therefore, this article presents a framework that enables complex dynamics such as these, that lead people to make compromises between competing health and livelihood outcomes to be examined.

Public housing and territorial stigma: towards a symbolic and political economy

This article illustrates how the stigmatization of public housing in Australia has been co-constituted by material and symbolic forces over several decades. Drawing on discourse analysis in conjunction with historical-institutional analysis of housing policy trajectories and the place of housing within political-economic change, it shows how territorial stigmatization can be understood as the product of media, policy and social scientific discourses which problematize public housing as well as histories of policy reform and political-economic restructuring which shape its social, material and institutional conditions. The discursive problematization of public housing estates in particular works to obscure the role of restructuring and reform and thus present demolition and redevelopment as a ‘common sense’ response, even as a form of destigmatization. The understanding of stigmatisation that this article advances—as a recursively symbolic and political-economic process—is therefore conceptually significant and important for critically evaluating government interventions in the context of stigma, including claims of destigmatization.

Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos

Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a policy of “Turning Land into Capital”, which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The policy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theorizations of land, value, capital, and rent, this paper argues that land under capitalism does not only operate as a rent-bearing asset, in which value is extracted from elsewhere. Land can also be treated as a real form of capital, or capitalized, when its social relations are transformed to facilitate value expansion and act as a store of value mobilized for further investment. It is imperative to investigate how land is used to expand value as capital, extract value as rent, or do both. This paper examines four manifestations of the Turning Land into Capital policy to outline the contours of struggles and contestations over the production and distribution of value in the Lao political economy.

Everyday Fiscal Encounters: Taxation and the Austerity State in Greece

Taxation has sparked ongoing controversies in public debate in Greece, especially during times of crisis. Popular opinion was unambiguous about the necessity to curb tax avoidance and evasion as an element of economic restructuration. In addition to lowering government expenses, austerity brought attempts at increasing government revenues through new taxes and an increase in enforcement.This article discusses everyday encounters with these new measures in Volos during fieldwork from 2014 to 2017. My interlocutors’ perspectives on the fiscal context reveal complex understandings of state relationality and political economic processes of extraction. The article groups them into four questions in relation to the austerity state: who gets to pay how much, who benefits from redistribution, whether tax compliance leads to political progress, and how government is part of a mechanism of larger value extraction and capital accumulation.Hence, everyday fiscal encounters reveal how people understand themselves as being implicated in the governance of political economies. The increased responsibilisation of Greeks to pay tax led to an increase in politicisations of the government’s role in redistributing revenues towards creditors. The fiscal encounter thus shows how large processes feature in everyday observations about statehood and capitalism, and can provide grounds for social critique through fiscal encounters.

From Conflict to Conviviality? Transforming Human–Bear Relations in Bulgaria

The question of how to transform human–wildlife relations from conflict to coexistence, rather than merely mitigating conflicts, has become a central focus of research and practice. In this article, we address this important question by exploring the factors that may contribute to promoting successful coexistence between humans and brown bears within Europe and elsewhere. We do this through comparative analysis of two cases in rural Bulgaria evidencing different degrees of conflict and coexistence between members of the two species. Through this comparison, we highlight the main factors that lead to conflict in our problem case as well as those that might help to instead foster coexistence. We situate this analysis within growing discussion of convivial conservation as a novel approach intended to transform conservation policy and practice throughout the world that emphasizes the importance of attending to the overarching social and political-economic processes encompassing human–wildlife interaction in order to influence the latter. In this way, we contribute to research and discussion concerning how to transform human–wildlife conflict (HWC) into convivial coexistence more broadly by demonstrating how attention to the immediate circumstances of human–wildlife encounter in such efforts should be complemented by promotion of more inclusive, democratic forms of decision-making, and egalitarian distribution of economic resources.

Chicken Politics

Some scholars contend that the Global South is experiencing a consumer-driven nutrition transition characterized by a sharp increase in meat consumption. This article engages critically with this hypothesis by exploring the production, distribution, and consumption of chicken in Tamil Nadu (South India). Using the analytical lens of political ecology, it argues that food circuits are shaped in the interaction among political-economic processes, biophysical processes, and embodied encounters with food. In India, intensified farming and agrifood industrial capitalism affect the materialities of, and the meanings attributed to, chicken meat, making it more available, more accessible, and more desirable. The industry strives to control and conceal the animality and organicity of chicken as animal and as food. Yet new materialities and meanings are resisted by the biophysical processes that pervade the circuits of meat provision and by eaters’ visceral and cognitive engagement with chicken meat. The very people who produce, sell, buy, cook, and ingest food, even though they are partly dispossessed by capitalist and state control over knowledge and economic processes, also play a role in shaping, negotiating, and resisting the material, political, and emotional dimensions of taste, and of eating practices at large.

Value and distributive repair

This paper is grounded in a historical ethnography of distributive processes in higher-level Romanian forest commons and particularly so in the forms of calculation that enable the achievement of durable forms of distributive justice. Ethnographically speaking, the main figure articulated in this context of an ethical mathematics of the commons is that of proportionality. Theoretically speaking, proportionality provides the starting point for an inquiry into the nexus of value, distribution, and justice. In this sense, value appears as the provisional outcome rather than the premise of political-economic processes: nested proportional relations encourage the activity of repair via successive iteration and transformation. The paper concludes by exploring the possibilities of distributive value in the commons.

A Polanyi-inspired perspective on social-ecological transformations of cities

ABSTRACT Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally specific modes of living, grounded in different classes and milieus. We show how, today, two modes of living—“traditional,” established during postwar welfare capitalism, and “liberal,” formed during neoliberal capitalism—co-exist. In the current conjuncture of rising inequality, neoliberal urban regeneration, and accelerating climate crisis, these modes of living are not only increasingly polarized and antagonistic, but also increasingly unable to satisfy needs and self-defined aspirations. Therefore, we explore the potential of social-ecological infrastructural configurations as an alliance-building project for a systemic social-ecological transformation, potentially linking different classes, social segments and forces around a common eco-social endeavor.

Material Climate Justice: Connecting Social Equity and Climate Risk in Urban Climate Adaptation

Climate reports underscore the differential impact of climate change risks for marginalized communities— women, people of color, indigenous communities, the disabled, and socioeconomically disadvantaged populations—and the need to recognize and address inequities in climate adaptation processes. To date, scholarship on climate adaptation in organization and management scholarship focuses on firm-level and empirical work has failed to account for the complexity and materiality of socio-ecological systems, historical processes that structure inequity, and the agency of actors within adaptation processes. To address this, we develop a material climate justice framework by extending conceptual links between risk, material feminism, and justice. The material climate justice lens combines climate justice (CJ) insights about political economic processes that distribute risks and rewards in the urban context and the materiality of differentially embodied exposures to risks, resources, and political advantages. We describe the ways representatives of marginalized groups practice agency in climate adaptation processes that are primarily being driven by government agencies in consultation with business, academic, and consulting groups. Findings suggest that representatives of marginalized populations engage in sub-processes to impact climate adaptation that expand notions of climate risk to include embodied experience connected to resources, representation, histories, place and future embodied experiences.